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WIKTIONARY VIA KAIKKI / WIKTEXTRACT
Imported dictionary evidence
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These are source reports, not reviewed *SET-U ancestry. A list of templates or numbered etymologies is not an ancestor chain. Scholarly disagreements remain in the original source text.
35,981 English word records · 45,491 etymology sections in this online subset
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No exact match for “Wal” in this partial English subset. That does not mean the full research corpus—or linguistic scholarship—has no record. Check the original dictionary entry ↗
INDEPENDENT SOURCE LIBRARY
More sources for this spelling
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Mayhew–Skeat (1888)
1888; pinned HTML transcription updated October 28, 2024
This word is outside the curated dossier collection. Here is the dictionary’s etymology, with its language and revision preserved. These claims have not yet passed *SET-U’s graph review.
German · Etymology
The root descends from Middle High German wal , from Old High German wal , from Proto-West Germanic * hwal , from Proto-Germanic * hwalaz , from Proto-Indo-European * (s)kʷálos ( “ sheatfish ” ) . Cognates include English whale , German Low German Waal , Icelandic hvalur , Danish hval , Swedish val .
Although the simplex root also existed in earlier historical stages of German, Grimm claims that the simplex had fallen out of used by Early New High German and was used exclusively in the compounds such as Walfisch and Narwal . The simplex later reappeared in the course of the 19th century, at first in the domain of scientific literature, as a back-formation from Walfisch . Compare also Dutch walvis , Low German Waalfisch .
Luxembourgish · Etymology 1
From German Wal , from Old High German wal , from Proto-West Germanic * hwal , from Proto-Germanic * hwalaz . Compare Dutch walvis , English whale , Danish hval , Icelandic hvalur .
Luxembourgish · Etymology 2
From German Wahl , from Old High German wala , from Proto-West Germanic * walu , from Proto-Germanic * walō . The related terms below are inherited.
Luxembourgish · Etymology 3
From Old High German wald , from Proto-West Germanic * walþu , from Proto-Germanic * walþuz . Cognate with German Wald , Dutch woud , English wold .
Plautdietsch · Etymology
From Middle Low German welle , from Old Saxon wella, walla , from Proto-West Germanic * wallijā .
Dharug bumarin and a Dharawal bou-mar-rang form are published candidates, but the Australian National Dictionary Centre says the exact source language remains uncertain.
Was Portuguese chá borrowed specifically from Cantonese or from Mandarin?
WALS gives a Cantonese cha route through Macao; Infopédia labels the source Mandarin chá. The shared cha-type Chinese family is secure, but the immediate variety label is not unanimous.
WALS describes a Dutch-mediated European route, while Merriam-Webster compresses the etymology to borrowing from Xiamen Chinese dé. The displayed Dutch stage is probable, not silently declared unanimous.
Were the medieval and early-modern witness objects directly inspected?
No. This review inspected dictionary records and a scanned etymological dictionary page, not the Skåne-Lagen manuscript, Söderwall’s underlying medieval objects, or the cited early-modern print pages.
Does every language follow a simple sea-versus-land rule?
No. WALS documents a powerful distributional tendency, not a universal law: 110 sampled languages have Sinitic cha-derived forms, 84 have Min Nan te-derived forms, and 36 belong to neither class.
frændi is friend’s cognate—but kinship became its Old Norse center.
The Germanic family did not carry one frozen dictionary definition into every daughter language. OED places Old Icelandic frændi beside English friend; Cleasby–Vigfússon and Fritzner preserve the old participial analysis; ONP then exposes what happened in use. Its 225 citations distinguish friend, foster brother or companion, kinsman or son, parents, and ancestor, with no sharp wall between friend and kin. The unveiling is semantic divergence backed by a shared graph: English centers chosen companion, while the Scandinavian cognate centers family without ceasing to be cognate.
Tea and chai are the same word after different journeys.
Both routes ultimately reach Chinese 茶. The te-type form traveled especially through Southern Min and Dutch maritime networks; the cha/chai-type family spread especially overland. WALS shows this is a global tendency with real exceptions, not a perfect rule.
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